Usama Khan: So welcome back to another episode. Today we have with us Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B, and we're talking about the best SEO strategy for SaaS businesses in 2026. What can you do to get results? Sam, can you tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do at Breaking B2B?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, appreciate you having me on. So like you say, I'm founder of Breaking B2B, and I run a podcast of the same name where we interview SaaS marketing leaders. We also do solo episodes on what's working today for SEO and AI search for SaaS companies. Outside of that, I've got two young kiddos, so I mess around with those and the wife a fair bit. And if I'm not doing that, I'm probably messing around on LinkedIn, rambling on about what we're seeing work in SaaS marketing and SEO, or doing some kind of skit or weird video.
Usama Khan: Solid stuff, man. I've seen you do some interviews on the streets. How's that been going?
Sam Dunning: Man on the street interviews, yeah, that's probably one of our most popular pieces of content. I got the idea from watching things like the School of Hard Knocks on YouTube. I thought no one had really done that, because this was two plus years ago when I started Breaking B2B. No one had really done it in the B2B space. So a couple of days later, I phoned up my video friend and said let's hit the streets and ask people weird questions with a B2B context. Like, do you think cold calling still works? How do you get ranked top of Google organic? Did ChatGPT kill Google? It's just funny to get all the different reactions, and people seem to enjoy that stuff. It stands out a bit. So yeah, it's good fun.
Usama Khan: Yeah, that was super interesting. So you grew Breaking B2B from a brand new domain to ranking for some very competitive keywords in the top SERPs, such as B2B SEO agencies. I saw it's ranking number two or three, and that was pretty quick. Most agencies take months to rank for meaningful, money-making keywords. Can you walk us through how you managed that internally for your own agency?
Sam Dunning: Yeah. When we started, I did it literally through brute force. When I started the agency two plus years ago, we had nothing. It was a brand new domain, just purchased, so it was almost like a test. I got the website up and running, got my friend to build it on one of the worst CMSes ever, called Duda. And I thought, first of all, can we even rank this thing?
I made it hard for myself as well, because I was trying to rank landing pages instead of blog articles. The reason being, most of the time I was heads down doing outbound sales or hitting my network, because we had pretty much zero customers. So I was trying to build a client base, get appointments, get sales meetings on the board. In the meantime, I was messing around with content and SEO, trying to get this website ranked as quick as humanly possible for our target customers. At the time it was B2B SEO, whereas now we focus on SaaS SEO.
So what I did, with the help of a content writer, was throw up a bunch of landing pages as quick as possible, because we had no content. Then I hit up basically every founder I knew in the B2B, tech, and SaaS space and asked if we could do a guest post on their site with a link back to us. Luckily a lot of them said yes. On top of that, I guested on a ton of podcasts, one to two every week, and asked all of those folks to give us a backlink.
To my surprise, within 90 days we got ranking number one for B2B SEO agency. I was pretty surprised, but I'd set it as a mission. I said, I'm going to go brute force and do everything I can to rank this landing page. And it worked. Then I talked on LinkedIn about how we structured it. It was a simple framework: problem, agitation, solution, proof, FAQ. Nothing too spectacular back then. And then I went crazy on all the backlinks I drove to it.
At the time that worked quite well. This was before the big AI surge, not long before AI overviews got fully introduced and ChatGPT and Claude got a lot more usage. It proved we could do it. Later we rolled that out as one of our main offers now, 90-days-to-revenue SEO programs for SaaS companies. Our approach has changed a lot since, because I have a team of strategists who can be more strategic about content, blog posts, listicle placements, technical, and the rest of what makes a sound SEO program. But that's what I did when we first started, purely because I was super scrappy and trying to get some impact on the board as quick as possible.
Usama Khan: Solid stuff. You mentioned a big part of that was backlinks. Has your opinion of backlinks changed now that AI is taking over and more people are going to AI chats to compare vendors and find solutions? Do backlinks still matter, or are they not as big a priority as they were in the past?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, probably mixed. I think backlinks are still useful from a Google organic perspective, and they're still a good thing to go after. But if I were a SaaS company, and we mainly deal with B2B tech and SaaS, I'd lean towards this: assuming you have a solid website and all of that is best in class, which we can talk about in a minute, then on the off-page side I'd lean more towards external listicle placements, roundup placements, and review site placements.
So when I'm looking at my money keywords, my bottom-of-funnel search terms around best XYZ software, best niche-specific software, or competitor alternatives, whatever those money terms or prompts are that folks look for when they need our software or are comparing options, I look at the external websites in my niche that rank well on Google organic and are getting pulled from in LLMs. I outreach to those and try to do a value exchange to get a top-three placement. That gives us a backlink, a write-up, and a brand mention. Plus, people who land on the article might inquire directly anyway. So you get two or three hits in one. I think they're pretty valuable, at least right now.
Usama Khan: Yep. So the brand awareness increases for the exact term you're trying to show up for in AI. What I do right now is suggest clients go after brand mentions more, and the prompts that are super important. You see what AI is citing for those on Claude or ChatGPT, there are always those sources, and you can make a list and reach out to them directly, instead of blindly searching on Google. A better way is to see what AI is already sourcing for the prompt you want to show up for, then reach out to those to get your brand mentioned there.
Sam Dunning: Yeah, I'd say do a mix of both. It's not always easy to manually outreach to these sites, because, as I often say with link building and brand mentions, you have to beg, borrow, and steal. Some will do a value exchange, so maybe they add you to their list and you add them to theirs. With some, you might be able to interview the founder or one of their execs on a podcast. Some might be up for pay to play. There'll be a mixture of ways you have to negotiate and work out a deal to get it done.
Usama Khan: Exactly. So how do you find the keywords that actually drive pipeline? Consider a SaaS business with an empty blog, and we're trying to not just bring in traffic but actually drive leads. What sort of keywords do we go after, and how do we find those keywords for that specific business? What's your process?
Sam Dunning: Yeah. So everything we do, before we even talk about SEO, and I care less about SEO and search, everything starts with customer research. What that actually means: in our onboarding, we're not asking that many SEO questions. We care more about who the dream client is, and what their top three most expensive, bleeding-neck problems are. Then what's the tipping point where they realize they have to fix it? Is it causing staff turnover? Loss of revenue? Something else? Then how do they describe the problem? How do they look for solutions like yours? What's the internal jargon or the way they describe your software or solution? What competitors do they evaluate, and how do they stack you against them? What causes them to eventually sign up or invest in your software?
All those kinds of things. And can we get access to sales calls? The beauty of the day and age we're in now is that you can hook up via MCP to call recording software. So sales calls, customer success calls, support calls, pull those from Fathom, Gong, or Fireflies into a Claude MCP. It helps you a ton with research, tone of voice, and understanding the customer, their pain points, and the real words they actually use. So you pull all these things, your differentiators, why folks opt for you over competitors, all that good stuff, before any keyword or prompt research. Get a good understanding of the landscape, the target clients, and the competitors, and pull that into a knowledge base that should be ever-growing. Then worry about keyword research.
In its simplest form, I came up with something a while back called the money keyword matrix. The easiest way to build it now is with an LLM. Once you've got that research on your product, your offer, and your customers, you can pull it together. Ideally, if you're the founder, you might know all this stuff. If not, get with your sales team, your CS team, and your support team.
The simplest way of doing it: column one is every way someone can refer to our software or solution. Column two is every industry we serve best, that has the expensive problem we solve, is motivated to solve it, and has cash to invest in our solution. The best source to find that is your CRM data, so look at your historic best customers. Column three is every competitor we get evaluated against, or that customers switch to us from. Column four is our dream clients' jobs to be done and expensive problems.
You can make it more detailed if you want, like the integrations people might search for, but to keep it simple, I do those four. Then you build it out. It helps you build long-tail money keywords. For example, if you're in the calendar scheduling space, what's every way someone can refer to your solution? It might be calendar scheduling software, tools, or platforms. What niches do you serve best? Maybe HR, fintech, sales, recruitment. You'd know this better than me based on CRM data. What competitors do you get stacked against? In the calendar scheduling world, there are only so many. It could be HubSpot meetings, Calendly, Chili Piper, Revenue Hero, Cal.com, and a bunch of others. Then, what problems do folks face? Something like how to avoid clients ghosting meetings, or how to avoid email back-and-forth for meetings, all those pain points prospects face before they look at a solution like yours.
Then you build your long-tail money keywords and prompts from that. In software, there are only so many ways someone can search for a solution when they need it. Going back to my example, it could be best calendar scheduling software, or best calendar scheduling tools for HR teams. The crux is building the long-tail searches folks look for when they have intent for your solution, not when they're just searching for information or trying to learn your niche, but when they're actively in that three-to-five-percent buying window of your total addressable market.
You can use a bunch of tools. We'll still use Ahrefs. If you're a newer website that hasn't done much SEO, I still think keyword difficulty isn't a bad thing to go on. So you can put the long-tail keyword into a tool like Ahrefs, and if it's low keyword difficulty and low search traffic, that's usually a good thing, because it means you could probably rank pretty fast. For example, taking the competitor column, if we were going for something like Chili Piper alternatives, Calendly alternatives, or HubSpot meetings alternatives, and it was low difficulty and reasonably low traffic, I'd say that's a good sign. Build the relevant page you need, because it'll probably rank pretty fast.
With the right structure and format, that page could drive some inbound demos or sign-ups relatively quick. So it's about using what you have, pulling that customer research to guide your keyword or prompt research, and building from there. Then you work out what type of pages will hit that search intent. I think a lot of folks overcomplicate SEO and AI search, when really it's about doing the basics. Simple, but not easy.
Usama Khan: Exactly. I've also seen that the depth of customer research and how quickly you see revenue from SEO are closely related. And like you mentioned, there are only so many ways someone looks for your software. For example, best Calendly alternatives or best meeting scheduling software. But with AI, according to some research, when people go from Google to LLMs, they give much more detailed prompts. That ties back into your point: if you understand your customers well and understand the problems they specifically face, you can speak their language inside your article and understand their world better. The better you do that, and the more specific your content, the more likely it is to get surfaced inside LLMs.
Sam Dunning: Exactly. And that's where, once you understand the type of query, let's say we're going for best Calendly alternatives for 2026, all you'd do is search that on ChatGPT, Claude, or Google. Chances are most of the sites being pulled in or cited are going to be listicles, so we evaluate the top ten options of 2026. But that's where, to your point, you need to build in the right structure.
So many SaaS companies get listicle structure completely wrong. They put a massive wall of text at the front, then eventually, after five minutes, get to the tool roundup. But LLMs only pull a small amount of information from your article. That's why a quick summary or TLDR right at the top is important. Then maybe a "why trust us" section, then a quick comparison table of the top three options. Then you jump into the full comparison table, then the detailed roundup of each option. So you have to get the structure right.
To your point, it's important that folks are now doing long-tail, very detailed prompts. That's where it's important to talk about your actual positioning. If you're best suited to mid-market teams, or you best suit a certain niche, put that in there. So when Google AI overviews or LLMs talk about you, if you're capturing that positioning, it gets pulled in. And likewise, if you're going to get featured on external assets, listicles, and write-ups, make sure that positioning is in there too. So if those prospects are looking for mid-market, startup, or enterprise, whatever it is, that's consistently mentioned across the web around your offer and your tool.
Usama Khan: The positioning consistency is a solid and really important point. When it comes to our own content, our own blog, our own social media, we can get the positioning right. But sometimes on third-party sources, let's say we're getting mentioned on a third-party listicle, even though our software targets small to medium-sized businesses, they might refer to us as best for enterprises. That gives LLMs mixed signals. How would you suggest small SaaS marketing teams go about this? Do they search for these pages that don't position them correctly, reach out, and get their story corrected? How do they approach this?
Sam Dunning: Sure. Most things with SEO come down to priority. It's working on what can drive pipeline, demos, sign-ups, or trials, whatever your conversion point is, in the shortest space possible. So most of the time in SEO, do the things that move the needle quickest. Don't overcomplicate it. If you're brand new to SEO, work out those money keywords and prompts folks look for when they're in market, like best XYZ software or competitor alternatives, evaluating competitor one versus competitor two versus you, all that stuff. Then make sure you've built out best-in-class content on your own website, so you've got all those lines in the water, those assets that can be pulled from, so you can control the narrative with your own foundation.
Then, to your point, look to get featured on external listicles that are being pulled into LLMs and Google. If they're incorrectly talking about your offer, positioning, or ICP, reach out to them on a priority basis. Which ones have the most clout? Which ones are cited most for your money terms and prompts? Depending on the size of your team, if you're a one-person marketing team, or one to three marketers as many SaaS teams are, it's about prioritizing. You won't be able to reach out to tons a day if you're lucky enough to be featured on tons of listicles. So which ones will move the needle most because they're cited most for your money keywords? Start with those first.
Reach out to the author. Do something different. Don't send them a wall-of-text email they'll ignore. Find them on LinkedIn, send a personalized request, send a custom Loom video. Thank them for featuring you, say you really appreciate it, and ask if they could quickly tweak the write-up, and you're happy to add them to your list as well. A lot of the time, folks do the bare minimum. Do something that helps you stand out if you actually want something done quickly. No one reads wall-of-text emails.
Usama Khan: Yep, makes sense. A lot of the time when we say getting results quickly with SEO, now that AI tools are getting better, people think that means churning out more AI content, scaling AI content, one-click articles, content engineering, whatever. How are you using AI to scale content production, if you are, and how do you think about balancing quality versus quantity?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, I think we're at a funny stage with AI content production, SEO, and AI search. We're at a bit of a weird stage. There's a lot of poor information, especially on channels like LinkedIn. The annoying part is a lot of folks putting out these things like, comment "Claude" and this is how I posted a thousand articles or a thousand landing pages, I produced them in ten minutes, my website got 10x traffic, and here's an upward-trending graph. Comment "Claude" and I'll send you the workflow. Claude just...
Usama Khan: Claude just killed marketers. Yeah.
Sam Dunning: ...killed my team of ten marketers. But there are two issues with this. One, they don't show that three months later Google absolutely crashed the site, because Google saw the content as flimsy and weak, and maybe even penalized it.
Usama Khan: I've seen that happen with one of my clients. Yeah.
Sam Dunning: So that's one downside. The other downside is a lot of these, not all of them, some are using it in a smart way, so I can't say everyone, but a lot of the people who post this are just doing it for clout and not actually running a business. You look at their company and it's just one person. They have no idea how SEO works in general. They're just trying to get a ton of leads to fill their newsletter. So it's a lot of empty promises, stuff that's a quick hit of traffic but probably not driving actual qualified demos or pipeline. And it could cause your website a lot more harm than good.
But, like many things, done right there can be some great use cases. For example, we've seen nice use cases where you build listicles that are AI-assisted. You pull in all the custom research, you try out the other tools and platforms you're going to include in the roundup, you layer all that information into the LLM, and maybe you use Claude Skills. You pull in all these stages, the keyword research, the customer research, the information about the tools, and you feed it all the granular info to help build a well-structured, formatted listicle that's going to get pulled into AI search. If you're doing that, great. Or maybe you're building a long-form landing page, using AI content, pulling in your research as needed, pulling in what's ranking well in search engines and AI search to know the structure and intent, and building you a stage-one format and structure. Then you've got a human in the loop to manually go through it and check it.
So I'm all for that. I'm not sure yet if you can fully rely on AI to run your content workflow. I know some do. We don't. We have a panel of fifteen-plus writers right now, because we don't believe it's quite at that stage. So that's a funny middle ground, at least from our point of view.
Usama Khan: Yeah. Full content engineering would only work if you're really great at it and you have that editorial lens and taste to know what good looks like. But if you're just not that good a writer, you just amplify the bad content. If you're a great writer, it's absolutely possible your output increases, because you have that editorial lens behind your judgment.
Sam Dunning: Yeah, I see uses for it. The other thing is, in SaaS especially, there are so many different page formats. Getting the structure right, keeping pages refreshed that are actually driving pipeline, keeping them updated, making sure the positioning, the research, and the angle are right so it resonates with your ICP. There's a lot to nail down. So yeah, why not go AI-assisted? Like you say, if you've got the expertise, why not?
Usama Khan: LLMs seem to be pulling from Reddit, Medium, and LinkedIn. What are your thoughts on that?
Sam Dunning: I agree they are. Everyone's going crazy about LinkedIn, but I'm not seeing it pulled that much for bottom-of-funnel searches, at least myself. Maybe that's just my system. A lot of people are going crazy, but I've not seen loads of it for real bottom-of-funnel software searches, competitor searches, and integration searches that could drive pipeline. Maybe it's more mid-funnel and top-funnel stuff. But certainly Reddit. Basically, if you do any bottom-of-funnel search in SaaS, it's coming up with potentially your site if you've got listicles and landing pages, potentially competitor sites, Reddit, and the usual suspects for review sites, G2, Capterra, maybe Clutch if you're in B2B services. So it's usually those usual suspects. I often say winning on AI search and getting consistent mentions is...
One second, mate. Sorry man, give me two secs.
Usama Khan: Sure man, take your time.
Sam Dunning: Sorry mate, are you still there? Apologies, completely on me. I forgot I've got a guy coming round to look at our boiler, because we've got a boiler issue in the house. That's on me.
Usama Khan: No worries, no worries. Yep, we were just chatting about Reddit.
Sam Dunning: Cool. So yeah, we were talking about LinkedIn and how it gets cited. I was talking about the usual suspects. Getting your profiles up to date on G2, Capterra, or Clutch if you're B2B services, whatever's relevant for your niche that your ICP or dream clients get trusted reviews, ratings, and peer studies from, is of course important. So I often say getting LLM visibility, getting dream clients to see you mentioned consistently on Claude and ChatGPT, and getting into that consideration set, is the important thing. A lot of that's just good bottom-of-funnel SEO, plus layering on B2B ecosystem marketing: review sites, YouTube, maybe getting into Reddit, but that's easier said than done. There's etiquette to it, and understanding where LLMs pull from. A lot of it is prioritization of resource. What resource do you have in-house that you can manage and have competence in? What do you then need to pay contractors, specialists, or agencies to assist with? Again, start with the no-brainer stuff, the stuff your dream clients are active on that's likely to drive pipeline in the shorter term, then ramp up as you get more cash, time, or resource in-house.
Usama Khan: Is Reddit something you're currently doing or offering as a service in B2B?
Sam Dunning: Reddit, we're experimenting with it. We don't offer it as a set plan, because we've still not nailed it ourselves. Once we nail it ourselves, we will. We operate SEO and AI search for forty to forty-five different SaaS companies, and they're in so many different niches. Reddit isn't a copy-and-paste framework. We've tried a bunch of tools and processes, but until we nail down a system for doing it consistently, we won't roll it out as a service. I know a lot of agencies do, some with great success. I'm always willing to learn on that side, because it's something we're trying to ramp up ourselves.
Usama Khan: When it comes to AI visibility, which prompts are worth tracking? How do you decide which prompts to track and whether your client is showing up, getting mentioned, or getting cited? That's an important distinction to make.
Sam Dunning: With great difficulty. With massive difficulty. The problem is you can use tools, there's a bunch, Ahrefs have got their own version now, plus a few others we use quite a lot. We try to do twenty to thirty prompts we'll track that are closest to what a prospect will look for when they're actually in market for the software. But they vary so much, and that's my issue with LLM tracking and visibility. You're never going to know exactly what your ICP is searching for, because the tracking and visibility are limited. So a lot of it is being sensible and working in the SEO long-tail keywords, then branching out into the prompts that make sense based on that. Track those, but also realize there's only so much you can track right now with LLM visibility. One, because the tools only show you so much in terms of prompt tracking, citation tracking, and share of voice against your competitors. And two, because, as we know, most LLM conversations and AI searches don't result in a click. So it's more about making sure you're doing all these best practices, your brand is being consistently mentioned, and on the attribution side, you track everything you can. But a lot of this won't result in traffic to your site. It all plays into what we call dark SEO and dark AI search.
Usama Khan: Yeah. Because someone prompting "best field service management software" gets very different results from someone saying, we're an HVAC company managing scheduling through spreadsheets, we need software that handles dispatching, route optimization, and invoicing in one place, and our budget is under five thousand US dollars a month. Naming a bunch of features they need. They'd get very different recommendations than someone just typing the category "best field service management software." That's why it's very difficult to track the exact prompts you need to look at. But, like you mentioned, take the long-tail keywords you're trying to rank for, pick up those keywords, and then merge them with your sales call analysis. You have those recordings, so see how buyers actually describe their problems and what wording they use. If you can combine the keywords you've already targeted and have pages for with the exact sales call language, that gives you a more holistic view. If you target a topic through different subtopic prompts, that gives you a more holistic view of where your AI visibility is. Otherwise you'd be looking at just a fraction of your actual visibility, if you're only tracking the small category-level keywords and calling them prompts.
Sam Dunning: That's it. It's a constant reiteration process. Customer research isn't one and done, it's something you should constantly be learning from. That's why for every client we can, we pull in from the MCP server for their call recording software across sales, support, and CS. If we can get that constant feedback loop, we can constantly understand the top three, four, five most expensive problems, the internal jargon those folks use to describe the offer, the main money niches and industries people are coming inbound from, and why they eventually sign the contract. If you're constantly getting that feedback loop, it's really going to aid your prompt research and keyword research, and how you position yourself within pages, articles, external sites, and more.
The thing is, it's good not just for SEO. It's good for your general B2B marketing. In your ad copy, you understand the problems that will resonate, the hooks that will resonate, the outcomes people care about. Same for your website. So many people build their website headlines based on guesswork. Our website headline, "SaaS SEO for revenue, not vanity," was literally taken from what we heard from marketing leaders and founders on sales calls, that agencies were focused on traffic, not pipeline. So let's leverage that, because people keep saying it. Let's put that in our messaging.
Usama Khan: Yep, makes sense. It's also important not to track prompts that no one is getting cited or recommended for, those typical top-of-funnel queries, because a lot of marketing teams obsess over those, and that just makes your AI visibility look worse than it actually is. But now I've started to see, for some top-of-funnel queries, these LLMs are starting to give recommendations as well.
Sam Dunning: I saw that actually. I think it was Ross Hudgens who posted about it recently, that top-of-funnel was starting to get some brand mentions again, which is interesting. I haven't seen it a lot yet. Maybe it's more in the States, or some other regions. But it's interesting that some top-of-funnel queries, I think they were more like very specific pain-point, job-to-be-done queries. Which is nice, because then you can position your product as a painkiller, and inside the article talk about what you might be struggling with and how your product gets the job done in a new, better way. I like that, because those articles back in the day were quite good. Not just generic "what is a KPI" or "how to build a website," but a specific pain point, a relevant use case, and a well-known problem for your product to solve. So I kind of like that, if it's jobs-to-be-done oriented and gives you a chance to feature your product. But we'll see.
Usama Khan: Yep. Makes a lot of sense.
Sam Dunning: But like you say, you don't want to start there. Always start at the bottom, where dream clients are likely to search. Once you've exhausted that, why not?
Usama Khan: Well Sam, on a closing note, if a SaaS founder is listening to this with a limited budget and a limited team, and they want SEO to drive pipeline, they don't care about traffic, what should their priorities be in the first few weeks?
Sam Dunning: Yeah, so it depends. Are we talking about a website that's brand new, or one that's fairly mature?
Usama Khan: Assume a fifteen to twenty-five domain authority. A bit old.
Sam Dunning: Okay. And reasonably thin on content?
Usama Khan: Yep, yep.
Sam Dunning: Yeah. So most of the time there are a couple of angles. One, do the exercise we talked about, work out your money keywords with that money keyword matrix. Two, a lot of companies focus on net new: net new content, net new backlinks, net new mentions and placements. But there might be value in what you already have. If you've got a website with some content, a blog up and running, maybe some landing pages, ICP pages, or integration pages, you can easily check if there's value there. The classic way is going on Ahrefs and looking for low-hanging fruit and quick wins. You could see all the keywords, or even use Search Console to see the pages and keywords maybe ranking on page two of Google, positions five to fifteen or so. If they have commercial value, meaning they're software-based pages, competitor, evaluation, or comparison pages, prioritize those candidates. The quickest win you can get in SEO and AI search is if you already have the page and it's just not top of Google or being pulled into AI search.
So improve the structure. If it's an article, do bottom-line-up-front. Make sure you have comparison tables. Look to blow whatever competitors are ranking right now out of the water in terms of structure, depth, unique research, social proof, and FAQs. Then maybe drive some backlinks and brand mentions to those. Get those ranking effectively, and they can often drive pipeline in the first 90 days of doing refreshes and updates.
Then prioritize net new. What content and pages do we not have that have commercial value, that folks look for when they need our software or compare options? Once you've done all that and built all those lines in the water, best in class on your website, then worry about off-page. Look to get backlinks and brand mentions, and again, don't start net new, leverage your partners first. If you've got partners in complementary industries, maybe not direct competitors but serving the same ICP, offer to do guest posts on their site. Maybe listicle exchanges, they write about you, you write about them.
Another good one: if you've got a founder or exec on your team who's done a lot of podcasts, YouTube, guest appearances, or past press, reach out to all those companies and get them to mention your brand with a link back. That's super low lift. You can go on Ahrefs, copy and paste your founder or exec's LinkedIn URL, and look at all the sites that have just put their LinkedIn URL in. A lot of websites and articles would have just put the LinkedIn URL in, and you can manually reach out and ask if they can do a targeted backlink instead of the LinkedIn URL. That one's massively undervalued, just looking at past media and press you've already done. You've already done the hard work, you just need to change the way your mention is described in the backlink.
So do all of that, and if you do it at speed and with the right process, you can outpace big competitors. What you'll find is enterprise brands move super slow, because they have lots of tiers of management and things take a very long time to sign off. I've seen enterprise brands take seven to eight months to publish one blog article. So as a small, scrappy startup, or a smaller, leaner marketing team, you can move way faster. You can go through all these stages, do the research, plan out your intent structure, start publishing content on your website, start doing the off-page work at speed, and slowly gain ground on those competitors and drive inbounds.
Usama Khan: Well Sam, thanks so much for joining. This was great, and I'm sure viewers got a lot of value out of it.
Sam Dunning: No, I appreciate it, man. Thanks for inviting me on. And if anyone heard the dog bark, please blame Barney the dog, because he barks at anyone who moves around the house.
Usama Khan: No worries.
